Autism: Education for students can be a challenge

Twelve-year-old Christian Goff stops pacing for a moment to gaze out the window at his family s home near Spring Grove. Christian s mother, Kim Goff, says reetitive activites like pacing are typical of children, like her son, who have autism. (THE EVENING SUN/Clare Becker)

When most parents send their kids off to school, all they have to do is walk them outside and wave goodbye as their kids step onto a big yellow bus. For Steve and Angela Brown, this process has not been quite so simple.

Much of the burden in finding the right school for their three autistic sons has fallen on them as parents, said the Browns. Finding the best educational program for their son Chris, who requires a bit more special attention than their other two sons, was especially daunting.

The Browns live within the South Western School District, but only a few schools in the area actually offer specialized autistic programs, so their son Josh goes to school in Spring Grove where these classes are available. Josh's class in Spring Grove is run by the Lincoln Intermediate Unit, an agency that runs the district's special education classrooms.

LIU classrooms offer students a unique educational experience and learning model that are tailored to their needs, said Brenda Hartman, supervisor of autistic support with the LIU. These include leading autistic therapy techniques, like Applied Behavioral Analysis, a method of instruction that has been scientifically proven to show results for the vast majority of students.

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Despite the LIU's efforts, only one of the Brown's sons still attends an LIU classroom. For Josh's twin brother Chris, the entire public school system did not work out.

Chris was just not improving in public school, Steve said, which was frustrating enough, but when Chris's behavior eventually forced him out of school entirely, the situation became completely disheartening.

The school was not able to handle Chris's unique needs, and so once he left Spring Grove, Chris had nowhere else to go.

"Say you have a child in the system and they say they can't handle your child," Steve said. "They say the staff can't handle it so they discharge your child. I understand it from the agency's standpoint, but it's the parents that now feel dejected."

Steve and Angela were left with nothing for Chris. He had been kicked out of every autistic program, Angela said.

"It was on us as parents to find a suitable location for him," Steve added.

After some panicked searching, the Browns eventually found New Story, a private school in York dedicated entirely to autistic students, and finally they are breathing sighs of relief.

"This school is willing to work," Steve said, and Chris is starting to make progress.

One of Chris's classmates at New Story is Christian Goff, whose parents endured a similar experience in their quest to find the right education for him.

Christian lives in the Spring Grove Area School District and had been attending an LIU classroom there for years, when his parents finally decided that enough was enough.

He wasn't making any progress, said Christian's mother, Kim Goff. So she started talking to school officials, asking for ways to get him transferred to another school, one designed specifically for autistic students.

For six months she fought the school district, attending the litany of meetings that goes into changing the course of care for a special-needs student, and still, the district said no.

That did not stop Goff.

"Is he getting what he needs?" she said, her voice cracking in anger. "No. He is 12 and still can't read or write. He doesn't understand how to type on a keyboard."

The school district did eventually approve Goff's request, but it took a lot of fight, too much fight, Kim said.

"That's what you have to do," Goff said. "You have to fight to get your kid into the right school. It's sad, but unfortunately that's the fact."

As it turns out, there are fighters like Goff all over the country. A nationwide survey conducted by Autism Speaks in 2011 found that even among parents who are happy with their autistic children's education, 24 percent said that they had to fight to get it.

One possible barrier to getting this specified level of education is cost.

In the South Western School District, it costs about $20,000 more per year to educate an autistic child in an LIU classroom than it does to educate a typical student, said the district's business administrator, Jeff Mummert.

When recent statewide budget cuts to education are also thrown into the picture, it's clear that school districts are feeling the squeeze. State funding for special education has not increased in the past four years, despite the fact that costs continue to rise, Mummert said.

School officials insist that, by law, they are required to pay for special education and that the district obeys those laws. They also explain that the drive to keep special-needs students within the public school system is purely for educational reasons and is not motivated by monetary factors.

Allowing special-needs students to attend the same school as typical students teaches them how to better socialize with others and prevents them from being too segregated from the general population, said Michelle Ludwig, special education supervisor with the Spring Grove Area School District.

"We provide them with as many opportunities as we can," Ludwig said. "That's what inclusion is all about."

Spring Grove even runs a unique buddy program that matches up typical and autistic students for afters-chool events and field trips. But as both the Browns and the Goffs have come to realize time and time again, the program works best for students on the higher end of the spectrum. Students with more specialized needs do not have programs like these available to them at most public schools.

"Why is this allowed to happen?" Kim said. "He is suffering. We are supposed to have all these services and I've got nothing."